Creepypasta Stories

Cold As Ice

By: William Dalphin

Jim Sterling was not having a good night. For reasons he couldn't begin to grasp, his life had become a nexus of misery. First, the snack machine down the hall from his office had eaten his last dollar. After pressing F4, he watched with hungry anticipation as the automated coil spun, slowly pushing the shiny bag of Doritos toward the glass, only to have it stop a millimeter short of tumbling down into the dispensary. Sterling had shaken that cruel beast with ferocity, trying to get the bag free of its taunting grasp, but the snack machine had remained defiant.

And now here he was, trudging with increasing fatigue across a frozen lake in the middle of a winter storm sometime after midnight with a knife lodged between his shoulder and his spine.

Jim Sterling really wished he'd gotten those Doritos.

It was just after 10 pm when his cell phone had started playing the Imperial March. Sterling had set that to be the ringtone for his ex-wife Charlotte so that he'd always know when it was her calling. It filled him with dread to hear that song. Sterling let the phone play for a good while before answering.

"Jim, it's Charlotte," she said calmly. Charlotte was always calm. Why shouldn't she be? Fifteen years ago she got the house and the dog. Sterling got to keep the car and the TV. It was a nice TV, but it had fit better in their living room than in his rinky-dink apartment.

"Listen, it's about Thomas," Charlotte informed him. "He's in the drunk tank down in Lakota."

Sterling sighed. This was not an uncommon occurrence. The divorce had been rough on Thomas, always little Tommy in his father's eyes. He had grown up to become big Tommy – big, drunk Tommy. Big, drunk, loud, brash Tommy. It broke Jim's heart when he thought about it.

"You need to go bail him out," Charlotte told him. Her voice sounded slightly muffled, probably puffing on a cigarette while sitting there in the kitchen of their house – her house – in curlers and a bathrobe, watching a rerun of that reality show she always enjoyed, the one where everybody was always running around half-naked and getting into arguments.

"I'm at work," Jim replied.

"And I got no car."

"Fair enough."

And so, the second miserable moment of the night concluded. Sterling estimated at least five more were waiting for him down in the Lakota Police Station.

Jim Sterling drove to Lakota. Or rather, Jim Sterling started to drive to Lakota, but he never got there. Thinking back on it as he shambled across the ice with a quickly-fading stride against an angry wind that licked the dry and cracking skin on his face, he came to a bitter conclusion: Jim Sterling was too god-damned nice.

I'm going to die, he thought, here in the middle of this frozen fucking lake. I'm either going to collapse from exposure or bleed out thanks to this knife and get picked apart by coyotes. I should be in Lakota. Actually, I should be at the office, sipping a steaming cup of coffee and licking Dorito dust off my fingers. No... no, fuck that. I should be at home watching whatever the hell is on Cinemax right now on that glorious goddamned TV, kicked back in my recliner and draining the last fifth of that Vodka I have in the pantry.

But he wasn't. Because he was too goddamned nice.

He had taken Norm Henderson's late shift on the phones because Norm had begged him, offering up the excuse that he wanted to drive his girlfriend with the weird Swedish name down to Sioux Falls to see a Led Zeppelin tribute band. Of course, that wasn't true... Norm was actually going with his other girlfriend with the weird Thai name, but he didn't want people around the office to know he had a side piece.